A Map of Recent Jobs Nearby

The question before the call

Someone with a wet basement, a failing furnace or a leaning fence wants to know one thing before calling a company: does it actually work around here?

A service area page listing twenty towns does not settle it. Anyone can type a list of towns, and most competitors have.

What settles it is evidence: a job two streets away last month, on a house built in the same decade as theirs.

A list or map of recent jobs provides that evidence. Done carelessly, it also publishes where customers live and what was wrong with their homes.

What reassures a homeowner

• Jobs in their own neighbourhood, not just their city.
• Recent dates, showing the work is current.
• The same kind of job as the one they need.
• Houses like theirs, by age or style.
• A sentence on what was done, in plain words.
• Enough entries to show a pattern rather than a fluke.

The fourth does more than owners expect. Houses built in the same years by the same builders tend to wear out in the same ways, and a homeowner who sees their era on the list assumes you know it.

What it must never reveal

An exact pin on a house, with the job beside it, tells anyone who looks that this address had water in its basement in March. Its owner would rather raise that with a future buyer on their own terms.

Other jobs reveal other things: a new alarm system, an expensive heat pump, an elderly owner, a house left empty while the work was done.

In law as well as courtesy, a customer's address tied to the work done there is personal information. Publishing it needs their consent, and most customers would rather not give it.

Show the area, not the house

The simplest method is to place each pin at the centre of the neighbourhood, or at a nearby main intersection, rather than at the house.

Street names need care. On a long road, a street name hides the house; on a cul-de-sac of nine homes, or a rural road with three, it points straight at one.

A list does the job as well as a map: the neighbourhood, the type of job and the month, newest first. It is also quicker to read on a phone.

Photos and permission

Photographs make an entry convincing, and they identify homes more easily than addresses do. A front door, a distinctive porch or a car in the driveway is enough for a neighbour.

Ask at the end of each job, in writing, with a line on the completion form: may we show photographs of the work, without your address? Many customers who would refuse a pin agree to that.

Crop out house numbers, licence plates, faces and anything personal in the room. Close shots of the work itself, such as a new drain, a patched foundation wall or a sump pit, are usually the safest.

Where it belongs on the site

Put each town's recent jobs on that town's page, and the latest few on the home page and beside the quote form, where the decision to call is made.

An embedded interactive map is heavy on a phone and fiddly to move with a thumb. A simple list, or a plain image of a map with the list beneath it, loads faster and reads better.

The list has one more advantage: neighbourhood names written as text can be read by search engines. Pins inside an embedded map cannot.

A worked example

A basement waterproofing contractor with two excavation crews works across a group of suburbs built largely in the 1970s, where many original perimeter drains have clogged with silt and roots.

Its site had a gallery of excavations and a service area page naming nine towns. Callers still opened with the same question: have you done any houses near me?

So the owner added a map with a pin on every job from the past two years, each with a photograph of the basement before the work.

Within a month, a former customer who was selling her house asked for her pin to be taken down. A buyer's agent had found it, flooded basement and all, by searching her street.

The map came down that week. In its place went a list by neighbourhood: the month, the kind of work, the decade the house was built and a line on what the crew found.

Photographs now appear only where the homeowner signed the permission line printed on every completion form. Callers mention a neighbourhood from the list instead of asking whether the company works there.

Keeping it current

A list of recent jobs that ends last summer says the opposite of what it was meant to. Visitors read the latest date before anything else.

Make adding an entry part of closing a job. Whoever files the completion form adds one line to the website, the same day or once a week in a batch.

Keep the newest at the top, and let the home page show only this season's work.

Honest entries only

The temptation is to fill the map with neighbourhoods you would like to work in. Every entry should be a job actually completed, in the place shown, in the month shown.

Customers check. A neighbour on the list may well be asked about it over the fence, and an invented entry is a misleading claim, not a marketing choice.

The counter-case

A business that completes only a few large jobs a year has little to list. A handful of detailed project write-ups will serve it better than a sparse map.

In rural areas, where any location narrower than the town identifies the house, list towns and the type of work, and leave it there.

For most trades working in homes, though, a current list of recent jobs by neighbourhood answers the question every caller asks, without telling anyone where your customers live.

Putting the map up

1. Add a permission line to completion forms.
2. List neighbourhoods, never house addresses.
3. Treat short streets and rural roads separately.
4. Crop identifying details from every photo.
5. Use a list that reads well on phones.
6. Put entries on each town's page.
7. Add new jobs every week.

Step one makes the rest possible. Without a written yes from the customer, the only safe entry is the neighbourhood, the month and the kind of work.

Photos customers send before the job starts are a separate matter, covered in a quote form that asks for photos.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.